believer

ergo: no. she is not comforted. and, no. she would never tell.

❝ i didn't realize you had a beetlejuice gimmick. ❞ it's unlike her to be quite so dry — rather, it would be, typically, but there's nothing typical about this scenario. if he'd extended a warning, she could have prepared. she would have been gracious. they would have cried, maybe even laughed, and there would have been much heartfelt discussion of bygones being bygones. she would have been in earnest, too: that is how she feels, at her core. more or less. she knows he had to leave, and she isn't sorry that he did. how could she be, after all he's accomplished? ❝ if i'd known, i might've shaved a few years off the wait. ❞

maybe it's that lana suspects he didn't call ahead because he'd wanted her unfiltered reaction. maybe it's that — even so — she can't seem to pull herself into a shape she recognizes, or one she especially wants to show him. she feels like an exposed nerve, at war with her own spite. her own loyalty. her own inextinguishable love.

she rises, all the same. there's no point in delaying the inevitable: certainly not with someone who can hear her heartbeat from across the room. across the world. she isn't sure who she hopes to find, turning around, but he's not the uncanny stranger from the news. neither is he unchanged — not by a long shot — yet he's still as familiar to lana as her own reflection. he still fidgets with his hands when he's anxious.

she shouldn't, perhaps, but lana smiles — and then falters as she promptly realizes she is completely lost. the notion of personal space had simply never occurred to them, as kids. it had had no place in the world they'd constructed together. the feet between them, though both predictable and few, seem somehow insurmountable.

he owes her a huge apology, and knows he has to give it. yet, nothing could have equipped him for the moment she looks at him, her gaze sinking into the hyper blue of his own.

she greets him properly, and he didn't realize he missed the sound of her voice in the same room as him until he hears it curl around the syllables of his name. it's different hearing her from across the country. here she is, right in front of him, in the flesh — just as vibrant and beautiful as the day he last saw her. the memory of her then overlaps with the image of her now, so vastly different but so significantly the same all at once in a way he struggles to reconcile. he feels the pieces of his heart crawl into his throat when she briefly smiles at him, struggling to find the words he wants to say.

❝ are you —- ❞ he blurts out, failing to catch himself before the beginning of the question slips out, because he wasn't ready; it wasn't exactly what he was looking to say or what he wanted to say. there's a more delicate way to phrase this surely, a better way to ask whether or not he'd be able to indulge himself to stake his regret, but he can't think of it. it's a good start to ask for her permission, but he needs to take ownership of it being something he wants as opposed to something he thinks he'd like to bestow upon her. reexamining his words a little bit, he sighs and she looks at him so expectantly, in such a way that rearranges his guts; she's still so unbearably kind after all this time, in all the ways he's certainly never going to deserve. ❝ would you be alright with me giving you a hug ? ❞

a couple years after that, the book had become something they'd worked on together (or, at least, that was when she'd started shamelessly drawing in all the margins). they'd been inseparable, she and @theory-wars, almost from the day they'd met. he's part of most of her earliest memories. for years --- fifteen years, to be exact --- there were new pictures nearly every single week. when lana was nine, she'd found an old polaroid camera that had belonged to her mother, and she'd clung to it like a security blanket. she'd carried it around her neck until it had finally worn out, sometime during junior high.

not much had gotten past her, then.

the album cuts short in the days before their senior prom, but lana gets nowhere close. It’s innocuous, what stops her: a snapshot of the two of them on the porch steps, all of fourteen, grinning up at the camera. she remembers it being taken, though there's no particular reason she should. it was late july, mid-heatwave, and they'd been to crater lake, and her hair hadn't wanted to dry. it could've been any day of any summer; nothing they hadn't already done a thousand times, by that point. they look happy. they'd thought they'd had it all figured out. that they were home. both of them.

he had been that, for lana, they all had: a family. she'd never even questioned it. she hadn't imagined she'd ever need to. she never would have guessed --- not in a million years --- that the only one to leave her on purpose would be the indestructible one. the only one she'd never worried about, not like that.

"god damn you, clark kent." but she's not angry, not anymore: the exasperation coloring her words is unmistakably fond, in its own way. in a way only he could inspire. "did you really think i would just stop caring what happened to you?" she's closed the album and is setting it aside when the air in the room subtly changes. she can see the front door, so she's positive it's locked, but one upstairs window has never quite latched. "unbelievable."

this is the part where, ideally, she'd either hit him or say something biting about his stupid costume, but she does neither. she doesn't even turn around. she doesn't move. she can't tell whether she's relieved or gutted to discover he still can't sneak up on her, even after all this time. not even in the privacy of her own home.

he thinks about how horribly young they both were, and how horribly broken the bulletproof boy was that day, walking across a stage to accept a diploma with a shattered heart and a father who he didn't know would also leave him shortly thereafter. clark doesn't recognize that boy he used to be in retrospect, but that doesn't mean he doesn't carry the burden of his mistakes. when jonathan joined his wife, clark did the unthinkable, something he never believed himself capable of doing, and he picked up and left everything behind that he ever knew with a profound grief that struck him to the very core. this was so unfair, something he should've reconsidered, and upon hearing lana speak so candidly against him he realizes it's about time that he answers for this transgression that she so never deserved.

ripping off the bandaid and flying over to her faster than he can blink, he's quick when he moves through the window and plants his feet onto the creaky wood of the floor below, gentle enough to avoid making the sound — but he can hear the uptick in her chest because he's still listening and he knows immediately that she has him made even without turning around. his stare is fixed onto the back of her head and he briefly wonders if she can sense it. clark doesn't know what to do with his hands, his fingers opening and closing repeatedly to occupy them with something.

❝ ... thing is, i know you wouldn't tell. ❞ despite the language he uses in answering her, his typical cheekiness isn't there; what underlines him instead is his guilt, because this is the first time he's seeing her in years, and he's abandoned her long enough. having known him better than he knew himself at some point, he doesn't doubt that she can hear it in his voice, too. he thinks about whether or not lana remembers that one confession he made to her the summer when they were fifteen years old, where he told her that he's constantly listening in on her: on the noises she makes when she shuffled through her house, on the words that left her mouth, on her heartbeat that thumped away against the cage of her ribs.